


sawed off shotgun

by concertconfetti



Series: Witchertober 2020 [9]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Decay, Gen, Graphic Description, Graphic Description of Corpses, Hurt No Comfort, Minor Character Death, Murder, Past Child Abuse, Trial of the Mountains, Witcher Contracts, Witchertober (The Witcher), rot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:06:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27037666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/concertconfetti/pseuds/concertconfetti
Summary: Lambert pays a visit to his family home.
Series: Witchertober 2020 [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1952140
Comments: 7
Kudos: 27





	sawed off shotgun

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Witchertober 2020 day 15 - Father 
> 
> Y'all, Lambert's father is a child abuser, a wife-beater, and a murderer. He's bad, he lives in filth, and that part of this fic is gross. Please proceed with caution.

If you ask Lambert directly, he’ll deny he even has a father. His mother, he’ll tell you about, because Vesemir claimed him when he was just this side of too old for training. Mama could do no wrong except, perhaps, staying with a man who routinely beat the shit out of her, and if she was too weak to survive a beating, well Lambert was always a good back up.

“Father? Nah, my ma pulled me out of a bog,” he tells Voltehre one night when his friend asks about his family. “Ask Vesemir. When he came and got me he actually had me fucking bathe, I was so covered in peat moss and mud.” 

They’re sitting cross-legged on Lambert’s bed in their year’s dorm - their year is unique in that four boys survived the Grasses and the Dreams, and so four of them will be going through the Trial of the Mountains together. To say they felt confident would be an understatement. (When Lambert thinks back to this night, he remembers it with a lecture Eskel gave him - he’s not sure if they actually happened at the same time. Eskel pulled him aside, gripped his shoulders, and looked him dead in the eyes. “You’re good, Lambert, but not invincible,” he said. “None of you are invincible.”) 

“You’re full of shit,” Voltehre says with a laugh, shoving Lambert’s shoulder. Lambert breaks into a grin. 

“How do you know, huh? Could be telling the truth. Maybe I’m half-siren, you don’t know,” Lambert says with a laugh. 

“If you were a siren you wouldn’t be so fucking ugly,” Gawain hisses from his bed. “Now shut the fuck up and go to bed.”

* * *

After Voltehre dies, Gawain, Lambert, and Breca drift apart. Lambert’s the only one who survives more than five years on the Path and he’s furious. He takes it out on Vesemir, usually, though both Geralt and Eskel sports scars from their attempts to comfort him. He gains a reputation among the remaining Wolves - _Lambert, Lambert, what a prick_ \- and he prefers it that way. He’s starting to think he’s cursed. 

Because when he’s in his sixth year on the Path, he goes home. He finds the shithole town in Aedirn where Vesemir found him and picks up a few contracts as a pretense to wander the village. It’s small, never grew more than seven families, and at the very edge of town still stands a sad, half-collapsed hut decorated with empty bottles and dead plants. Home, sweet, home. 

He waits, of course, until he’s finished the contracts. May as well squeeze as much out of this place as he can before he breaks Geralt’s precious “Witcher Code” and bashes his father’s head in. The first one is simple, a pack of drowners killing fishermen on the river banks. Take out the drowners, blow up their lair. Barely worth the coin offered, but whatever. 

Lambert wishes he negotiated the second contract - he spent hours in the godsdamned woods sniffing the fucking air like a dog, following the scent of blood to what the barber-surgeon assured him was a lair of nekkers. When he finally finds footprints, it becomes clear it’s a fiend and he’s wildly underprepared. His anger and frustration push him forward anyway. 

“You’re not invincible, Lamb,” he mutters, dragging the fiend’s head behind him by its antler. His insides are burning from toxicity poisoning, the wounds on his leg ooze with blood and pus as Swallow slowly pulls his skin back together. “Stupid fucking Eskel. Hate when he’s right.” 

Lambert manages to get to the barber-surgeon's house sometime around midnight, pounding on the door, well aware he looks like any man’s worst fucking nightmare. In the end, he’s lucky he gets paid at all - the barber actually fucking screams like Lambert is unrecognizable. Still, he pays him more than promised to ‘get the fuck out of here thank you very much,’ and Lambert shrugs and tosses the fiend’s head at the man, knocking him over. No time like the present. 

There are a lot of things a house can represent. To most kids, it’s home - warmth and love and kindness, the feeling of comfort and rest. The hut Lambert grew up in, in his mind and through the trials, became a monster. With all of his training and bluster, he was afraid of coming back to this house that sags sadly, half-buried under moss and rot. The touches of his mother - the paintings of Melitele in the window, the lace curtains - are gone, replaced with nothing. Rage wells up in his chest and Lambert lunges forward, bodily crashing through the rotted wood door. 

The stench inside is suffocating - blood and piss, shit, and decay. Someone wretches in the corner on what used to be a bed, and in the center of the home is a pile of grime and bones and lace curtains. 

“Who the fuck are you?” The man on the bed wheezes; Lambert turns his full fury toward him and the frail, rotting man and he shrinks. “W-witcher sir, please, mercy. I’m but a poor - ”

“Shut the fuck up,” Lambert hisses. “What the fuck did you do to her, old man? What did you do to mom?” 

“...Lambert? Y-your alive..?” 

“Answer the question!” Lambert says, storming through the sludge that was his life and pulling out the knife he uses for beheading monsters, still covered in Fiend blood. “What. Did you do. To my mother?” He emphasizes each part of his question with a jab of his knife.

The skeletal remains of his father scowl and he tries to draw himself up, to _intimidate_ Lambert. It almost makes the Witcher laugh. “That bitch,” this waste of a man spits, literally and figuratively, “was hiding money from me. Me! I owned her. And she was trying to leave. She got what was coming to her.” 

Lambert’s grip tightens on his knife; what had he expected? To save his aging mother? She wouldn’t want a Witcher son, even for as short of a time as she’d have him. Death, however, left to rot in a house without a proper burial, threatened each day with necrophages - the fact that his father remained meant the murder was recent. Geralt would let this man suffer, maybe burn the cottage and the rotted man inside alive. But Lambert is no saint, and he’s well out of patience. The knife slips into his father’s throat easier than any monster’s neck. If the shack is on fire when he leaves, that’s the villagers’ issue. 

If you ask Lambert directly, he’ll tell you he doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t, not now, not for a long time yet.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from S.O.S (Sawed Off Shotgun) by The Glorious Sons


End file.
